Video: Should Division II Overhaul the Playoff System? - with Mike Racy

[IUPNation]

What a terribly defeatist attitude to always go with "go to FCS if you're good" instead of demanding your own school do better than the bare minimum qualifications. D2 schools can offer 36 scholarships. But then when teams actually offer 36 scholarships and your own school offers not 36 scholarships, you want them to move out so your own school doesn't have to improve on anything.

I'm sure the good D2 football schools would love to move to FCS if that's all it was. It's too bad it takes tens/hundreds of millions to move the entire athletics program. It's much more feasible for the bare minimum D2 programs who cry about funding to just go D3.

Grand Valley is loaded.

[IUPNation]

No chance they reduce the field. If anything, it will get bigger.

When it was at sixteen..that was enough.

[KleShreen]

Another potentially interesting thread has been completely hijacked.

I maintain that the main problem with the current system is not the regionality by itself, but the rigidity by which the regionality is applied. There's no need to swing all the way to an FCS system, just allow for a few "wild card" selections and arrange the bracket based on teams' actual locations, not just their conference.

The only way this gets solved is by compromise. If any program isn't satisfied by a compromise, FCS is always an option.

What a terribly defeatist attitude to always go with "go to FCS if you're good" instead of demanding your own school do better than the bare minimum qualifications. D2 schools can offer 36 scholarships. But then when teams actually offer 36 scholarships and your own school offers not 36 scholarships, you want them to move out so your own school doesn't have to improve on anything.

I'm sure the good D2 football schools would love to move to FCS if that's all it was. It's too bad it takes tens/hundreds of millions to move the entire athletics program. It's much more feasible for the bare minimum D2 programs who cry about funding to just go D3.

[EastStroud13]

No chance they reduce the field. If anything, it will get bigger.

Agree. Any proposal where the number of total playoff qualifiers decreases is DOA.

[IUPbigINDIANS]

I don’t even k is if there should be wildcards. Win your conference, go to the playoffs. Twenty eight teams are too many.

No chance they reduce the field. If anything, it will get bigger.

[IUPNation]

Another potentially interesting thread has been completely hijacked.

I maintain that the main problem with the current system is not the regionality by itself, but the rigidity by which the regionality is applied. There's no need to swing all the way to an FCS system, just allow for a few "wild card" selections and arrange the bracket based on teams' actual locations, not just their conference.

The only way this gets solved is by compromise. If any program isn't satisfied by a compromise, FCS is always an option.

I don’t even k is if there should be wildcards. Win your conference, go to the playoffs. Twenty eight teams are too many.

[EastStroud13]

Another potentially interesting thread has been completely hijacked.

I maintain that the main problem with the current system is not the regionality by itself, but the rigidity by which the regionality is applied. There's no need to swing all the way to an FCS system, just allow for a few "wild card" selections and arrange the bracket based on teams' actual locations, not just their conference.

The only way this gets solved is by compromise. If any program isn't satisfied by a compromise, FCS is always an option.

[KleShreen]

I don’t see your basketball team in the rankings…guess you suck.

Correct. They do.

They've also won the same amount of championships as IUP, so.

[IUPNation]

Regionalization is a prime reason why teams don’t go out of region to play games. It doesn’t help the metrics for them to risk a loss on their SOS for Win out of region.

Exactly. I don’t like it either.

[IUPNation]

I suppose if anyone is going to know about has been status, it would be the IUP fan! =)

I don’t see your basketball team in the rankings…guess you suck.

[GorillaTeacher]

Regionalization is a prime reason why teams don’t go out of region to play games. It doesn’t help the metrics for them to risk a loss on their SOS for Win out of region.

[IUPNation]

We have 50 seasons of playoff matchups showing how bad the conference strength in the northeast is. And we also have the last 12 seasons (at least) of PSAC schools refusing to play against anyone of note outside of their own region.

If Grand Valley hadn’t pissed off so many schools the GLIAC would have more teams like it used to and you would not be begging everyone to fill out three weeks of your schedule every year. There are real reasons why so many schools bolted the GLIAC and GSC and formed new conferences on their own over the years.

The regular season doesn’t mean so much anymore. It’s about looking good on a spreadsheet at the end of the regular season.it’s not the way it should be…and that would open up schedules to play morr team from other conferences in the regular season. There would be less worry about OOC losses hurting your playoff bid because you’d only get in by being a conference champion and your playoff seed would factor in who you played OOC and the results.

[KleShreen]

You all have failed to prove why the current set up does not work.

Does the NFL reshuffle it's deck when it comes to playoff time?

Did Goodell, a huge Chefs fan, decide that the AFC was more stacked so he was going to switch the Bills and Bengals to the NFC bracket and move the Vikings and Buccaneers to the AFC to even it out and try to engineer a Chefs vs Bills/Bengals final that everyone thought should be the Super Bowl?

The facts of life are not always fair.

Division 2 is what it is...small college level foosball. That is why the NCAA sets it up regionally to accommodate the 160+ schools playing foosball at this level and not to placate the fans of the 6-10 schools that dominate the level every year.

Nobody has put a gun to the heads of the schools whining about the setup to stay in Division 2. NWMO and Grand Valley have the money to move up but they choose to stay in D2 and dominate. Ok...so live with the way the level is run or go away.

Proposing the same setup as FCS is kind of humorous. If you want that setup, the answer is to move up and be a part if that process. Plenty of D2 powers of the past did it and some have flourished and some just went into obscurity.

The current regional setup still produces the best teams as it's champion.

You can't go a FCS setup unless everyone is willing to travel all over the country and conferences open up several OOC slots on everyone's schedule. Who is paying for that?

I would love to see MIAA teams get the chance to see the real world and come to Pennsylvania in September. IUP's best years was when they were playing North Dakota State and Portland State in Oregon and Grand Valley in he regular season. I don't want to always see an NE10 team on the other side of the field. Although, our upcoming four year series with Ashland will be nice for both schools.

As long as schools stay close to home in the regular season, you can't demand the playoffs be based on conference strength when the conferences don't mix during the regular season.

You need to fix the regular season setups before you can justify changing the playoff format.

So to stop this constant whining about the MIAA and GLIAC in the same region ....JUST FRIGGEN MOVE THEM APART!

Region 3 - MIAA/LSC/GAC
Region 4 - GLIAC/NSIC/RMAC

HOW HARD IS THAT TO DO?


My opinion is that there are too many teams in the playoffs now that don't belong there...non conference champions.

Yep...the playoffs shouldn't be regionalized. They should just be for conference champions who are then bracketed.

If you didn't win your conference, why should anyone get a shot to win a national title. It should make winning your conference that much more of a goal.

I don't care if some second place teams are better than some conference champions. That would give an incentive for every conference to have a title game which would essentially be Round 1 of the playoffs.

There should only be a 16 team conference champion only playoff format. Split it into and East/West bracket and let it play out.

We have 50 seasons of playoff matchups showing how bad the conference strength in the northeast is. And we also have the last 12 seasons (at least) of PSAC schools refusing to play against anyone of note outside of their own region.

[KleShreen]

For now they do…everything comes and goes. In two years Grand Valley could go back to its has been status it enjoyed during the twenty teens.

I suppose if anyone is going to know about has been status, it would be the IUP fan! =)

[Ram040506]

Coming from east coast elitist who think the United States ends somewhere between Pittsburgh PA and Columbus Ohio, and refer to us entitled folks as flyover states.

Dang so you won the conference championship and then got your ass kicked by 35 what 3 weeks later? That's harsh. At least you caught lightning in the bottle the first game.

They caught a monsoon, not lightning.